But even in very early societies the recognition of artificial political entities must generally have owed its power of stimulating impulse to associations acquired during life.

A child who had been beaten by the herald's rod, or had seen his father bow down before the king, or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or the king, or the stone by association.
Recognition often attaches itself to certain special points (whether naturally developed or artificially made) in the thing recognised.

Such points then become symbols of the thing as a whole.

The evolutionary facts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eating insects a putrid smell is a sufficiently convincing symbol of carrion to induce them to lay their eggs in a flower, and that the black and yellow bands of the wasp if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keep off birds.[11] In early political society most recognition is guided by such symbols.

One cannot make a new king, who may be a boy, in all respects like his predecessor, who may have been an old man.